London

London, 29th September 2011– Jones Lang LaSalle is playing a key role in a three-year project announced by The Clinton Global Initiative to reduce energy use, create jobs, and provide significant savings for the commercial real estate sector by boosting the market for energy-efficient commercial tenant space.

“By making commercial buildings more energy efficient we can not only reduce harmful air pollution, we can save property owners and tenants serious cash,” said Yerina Mugica, Associate Director for NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation. “By bringing together the right mix of stakeholders – building owners, managers, occupants, financiers, and efficiency experts – we can clear the roadblocks that are keeping the building sector from taking advantage of major savings in energy costs. The Clinton Global Initiative is connecting the dots to provide more access to these economic benefits within the commercial real estate industry.”

“The Empire State Building's groundbreaking work with the Clinton Climate Initiative proved we can integrate energy efficiency into buildings with known costs and returns on investment. Tenant installations offer a similar opportunity, and with tenant spaces consuming between 55-60% of total office building energy consumption, there are huge opportunities to save money, improve competitiveness, increase profits, and create local jobs. Just as the Empire State Building/CCI project has proven to be a useful blueprint which others have followed, the Center for Market Innovation project will create a model which can be replicated around the world,” said Tony Malkin, President of Malkin Holdings.

“Partnering with NRDC and our demonstration project teams helps us to develop energy efficient solutions that deliver savings for high performing tenant spaces,” said Dana Schneider, Vice President, Sustainability Services Market Lead at Jones Lang LaSalle. “The more successful business cases we develop, the more we can drive broader market adoption of efficient spaces that perform for the people who occupy them.”

Schneider serves as project manager for a whole-building retrofit of the Empire State Building designed to reduce energy consumption by 38 percent. Although the bulk of the infrastructure work has been completed, Schneider continues to collaborate with new and renewing tenants to ensure that space build-outs conform to the building’s design guidelines for energy efficiency, and to install submeters and a tenant energy management system in each new space so that tenants can easily monitor the energy they consume (and pay for), resulting in greater attention to conservation methods. The tenant energy management system also allows tenants to measure their carbon footprint.

The success of the tenant engagement programme at the Empire State Building—and Malkin’s dedication to sharing details of the entire retrofit process as a replicable model—provided a powerful example for the NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation project. Through this project, Jones Lang LaSalle and the other partners will work with tenants who are signing or renewing leases for new or existing property to incorporate energy efficiency measures into the design of their premises – from lighting, to air distribution and energy management systems – and to carefully measure and document the economic benefits generated by the high performance measures. Bloomberg and LinkedIn have signed on as model tenants under the programme.

Julie Hirigoyen, head of Jones Lang LaSalle’s Energy and Sustainability Services (ESS) team, added: “The goal is to help other tenants throughout the nation identify the savings potential efficiency can offer, and provide a roadmap they can follow, in order to boost the market for energy efficient commercial building space. While many people are trying to accelerate the growth of this market, the project is unique for two reasons: It focuses on tenant demand for green buildings as the driver for increasing the energy efficiency market. And the expertise in the project team includes industry leaders from every aspect of the market.”

Jones Lang LaSalle will identify potential tenant and owner participants, and will propose cost-effective efficiency measures for these participants. Johnson Controls will also advise on potential efficiency improvements and will help develop and implement the measures to track actual energy savings, while Goldman Sachs will identify financing options for these efficiency projects. And NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation will ensure robust and transparent measurement, verification and reporting of energy savings from the improvements, as well as work with project partners to develop a blueprint for replicating successes from the initiatives.

Additionally, Vornado and Malkin Holdings will help identify project opportunities, and provide data from their portfolios that demonstrate how efficiency upgrades to building central systems can enhance the benefits that accrue to tenants from green tenant installations. YR&G will assist in the development of materials that support a broad range of designers, tenant facility managers and executives in their respective understanding of the process and opportunity for high performance build-outs. And Greenprint Foundation will assist with the design of data collection methodology for the demonstration projects’ measurement and verification protocols, integrating these with existing Greenprint data collection and reporting procedures.

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Notes to Editors

About Natural Resources Defense CouncilThe Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is an international nonprofit environmental organization with more than 1.3 million members and online activists. Since 1970, our lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists have worked to protect the world's natural resources, public health, and the environment. NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Livingston, Montana, and Beijing. Visit us at www.nrdc.org.